The Organic Concepts in Aesthetics

Abstract

propositions or abstract ideas. Instead of this intrinsic false art possesses another kind of artificial and not real. The parts may be put together with great ingenuity and polish, their aggregation may be glossed over with all kinds of ornament and brummagen, but they do not belong: their conjunction does not appear inevitable. Following good precedent, from now on I propose to call this kind of unity mechanical unity. Critics and public may be deceived by it for a while, but sooner or later some shrewd critic will expose it. Nor does this kind of writing usually like to be called mechanical. Indeed, that designation will be hotly contested by admirers of those works. They may speak of decorum, of conventions, of order, and even of classical balance. As Coleridge19 noted, a deceitful counterpart of the superficial form and colors may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it in their mouths (BL, II, 65). Artificial unity, he says, seems to me like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box, we first look at one part, then at another, then 19 The works of Coleridge are quoted as follows: BL is Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), reprint of 1954; the other works from the Shedd edition, reprint of 1884; the Shakespeare Lectures from the 2nd ed. of Raysor's collection, Everyman's Library, 1960. For Coleridge's contributions to our concepts, see G. McKenzie, Organic Unity in Coleridge, University of California Publications in English, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-108, a very full survey which is still of use, and, more profoundly and perceptively, R. H. Fogle, The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism (Berkeley, 1962).